A group of Jewish leaders are fed up with right-wing efforts to combat antisemitism. So they created their own strategy.

The Shofar Report, released this week by the liberal-leaning Jewish group Nexus Project, is a new guide to fighting antisemitism that its authors say is intended to curb the strategies of the Trump administration. The new report was written explicitly as a rebuttal to Project Esther, a 2024 blueprint against antisemitism written by the conservative Heritage Foundation that outlined many policies now undertaken by the Trump administration, particularly on campuses.

“Project Esther was not a strategy for fighting antisemitism,” Jonathan Jacoby, the Nexus Project’s president, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview. “Project Esther is the Heritage Foundation’s tool for implementing Project 2025” — referring to a now-infamous policy blueprint for a second Trump term.

What Trump and his supporters are actually doing, Jacoby said, is “weaponizing antisemitism.” Conversely, he said, that is bad for the Jews: “Weaponizing antisemitism breeds antisemitism. Weaponizing antisemitism undermines efforts to confront antisemitism.”

In response, the Shofar Report — released during the High Holidays in an effort to mimic a shofar blast as a wake-up call to Jews — calls for policymakers to wind back the clock. Many of its own recommendations for fighting antisemitism involve undoing Trump’s handiwork, along with some new proposals. Slashing university funding, arresting and deporting student protesters, blocking student visas and tying synagogue security funding to immigration enforcement are all steps the new report says must be reversed to properly fight antisemitism.

Its central message: that fighting antisemitism requires fighting for democratic institutions and embracing traditional liberal coalition-building. Universities, civil rights law, and immigration rights all must be protected in order to safeguard Jews within a liberal democracy, the authors argue.

That could prove a challenge, as many Jews have felt scorned by a lack of allyship from such coalitions and institutions after Oct. 7. Some of the more combative Jewish groups, such as Betar US and Canary Mission, not only support Trump’s policies but are actively aiding them by naming pro-Palestinian protesters for the administration to target.

Jacoby acknowledged that Jewish appetites for coalition-building are lower now. But, he insisted, “Those coalitions are what we need to be strong in order to fight antisemitism.”

“Jewish safety is of utmost importance and must be protected,” he said. “There’s no substitute for that. We need to build on that, and understand how we can create an infrastructure, a civil and community infrastructure, that supports that, and that complements that. And that’s where coalitions come in, and that’s where institutions come in, and that’s where education comes in.” 

The report’s authors speak highly of the Biden administration’s own, now-abandoned plan for countering antisemitism after Oct. 7, which had identified the problem in terms of civil rights. They seek a return to what Jacoby called a “precedent for listening to Jewish voices about this” after Project Esther, the majority of whose contributors were not Jewish.

Contributors to the Shofar Report include Amy Spitalnick, head of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs; J Street CEO Jeremy Ben-Ami and UCLA professor Dov Waxman; New Israel Fund president David N. Myers; prominent Jewish academic Lila Corwin Berman; Hannah Rosenthal, a former U.S. envoy for combatting antisemitism under the Obama administration; and author Emily Tamkin. 

Among other recommendations are a push for rollbacks on Trump’s antisemitism policies. The report calls for education funding, student visas and civil rights enforcement to be restored; for the administration to stop accusing nonprofits and NGOs of supporting terror; and for nonprofit security grants, which fund synagogue security plans, to not be “beholden to an administration’s ideological whims on issues like diversity or immigration.” 

In this respect, the Shofar Report is following what appears to be the majority of American Jewish opinion. According to recent polling by Ipsos, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Rochester, 72% of American Jews believe Trump is using antisemitism as an “excuse” to punish universities, and two-thirds don’t believe antisemitism justifies cutting university funding.

“As Jewish Americans struggle with hatred, even alienation from the Israeli state, they discover a slippery president who exploits a true danger,” that study’s authors, James Druckman and Bruce Fuller, wrote in an op-ed this week for the Chicago Tribune. “Trump erodes the very institutions that have long provided safety, learning and upward mobility for Jewish families — all the while claiming that he’s protecting Jews.”

Not all of the Shofar recommendations are critical of Trump. An essay by Waxman and Ben-Ami backs the president’s 20-point plan to secure Gaza, dismantle Hamas and extend its ceasefire with Israel (while also urging the administration to end “blank-check” funding for Israel and to stop supporting far-right parties around the world). That, too, is in keeping with what some Jewish leaders who are critical of Trump have said about his Gaza plan in recent days.

The report’s authors also push for ideas such as media literacy programs, Holocaust and Jewish history education, “off-ramp” programs to help people leave extremist movements, and combatting disinformation with the aid of social media companies (the QAnon and Great Replacement conspiracy theories in particular).

Though light on specifics, Jacoby said the report would ideally lead to a broader effort from Jewish groups and institutions to articulate new visions for fighting antisemitism while upholding liberal democracies. He was encouraged, he said, by recent signs of Jewish pushback to Trump, including Jewish presidents of top universities rejecting a federal funding “compact” that critics said would have compromised academic freedom in order to restore grants pulled over purported antisemitism concerns. 

He further predicted that the FBI’s recent severing of longstanding ties with the Anti-Defamation League would also galvanize the Jewish community: “I think that American Jews see the danger in these kinds of policies.”

There remains the question of how much influence such a report can have. As long as Trump and Republicans remain in power, the Shofar Report’s recommendations and persuasions will be swimming directly against today’s political currents. Jacoby lamented that properly dealing with antisemitism was not “a bipartisan issue,” but remains optimistic “that it will become one.” 

“I would say there’s more work to be done,” he said. “Each of these recommendations needs to be translated into more concrete and more specific ideas for action, and our hope is that they will be over the coming year, and actually over the coming years as the political landscape shifts.”

He added, “I think this is the beginning. I think we need to take more steps to make this more concrete. And we will, and so will other organizations. … I think we are a guiding force.”

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When Susan Stamberg first sat behind the microphone to host a newfangled broadcasting venture called National Public Radio, in 1972, some board members had a concern: She sounded too Jewish.

Though that wasn’t quite how they tended to phrase it, recalled a colleague. Instead, NPR board members feared that the “All Things Considered” co-host was “too New York” for Midwest audiences.

“Besides being a woman, the Jewish element was another aspect,” Jack Mitchell, an early producer on the daily afternoon program, told NPR. “Here is somebody whose name is Stamberg. She had an obvious New York accent. Made no bones about it… And the president of NPR asked that I not put her in there for those — because of the complaints from managers.”

Stamberg went on the air anyway, and quickly became a defining personality for the nonprofit radio network. In subsequent decades, as NPR turned into a cultural juggernaut, Stamberg and her “New York” personality became something of its unofficial mascot. In the elevators of NPR’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, her voice guides visitors from floor to floor.

Stamberg died Thursday at age 87, leaving behind years of her bubbly conversations and an annual, love-it-or-hate-it recipe for her family’s “cranberry relish.” 

As one of NPR’s “founding mothers” in the 1970s, she helped shape the network’s personality: warm, liberal-leaning, and — along with or laying the groundwork for fellow longtime marquee names like Nina Totenberg, Ira Flatow, Terri Gross and Robert Siegel — unmistakably, culturally Jewish. In later years, long after her retirement from regular on-air duties, Stamberg would still pop up to read the winners of NPR’s annual “Hanukkah Lights” short-story contest.

“I am very sociologically Jewish. Very ethnically Jewish, although not in an observant way.  There are a lot of people like me,” Stamberg told the Jewish Women’s Archive in 2011, adding that she willingly participated in Torah study with her son Josh — today an actor — when he was becoming a bar mitzvah at her husband’s request. “I feel deeply Jewish and I deeply identify with my Jewishness, but it doesn’t need a formal affiliation for me.” 

Born Susan Levitt in Newark in 1938, she was a child of Manhattan’s culturally Jewish scene. Stamberg grew up without regular Jewish observance, though she told the Jewish Women’s Archive she was part of a confirmation class at Temple Rodeph Sholem, the Reform synagogue on the Upper West Side. Her father, a staunch Zionist, raised money for the Weizmann Institute, the research institute founded in 1934 in Rehovot. She earned an English literature degree at Barnard College, the first in her family to go to college.

She married Louis Stamberg, who became a longtime USAID staffer, and the duo moved to Washington, D.C. Susan recalled that her husband, whose father founded a congregation in Allentown, Pennsylvania, grew up “where being Jewish was really an issue.” Her father-in-law “was insistent that we, too, join a temple in Washington. I said, ‘Well, Why?’” she recalled in 2011. “That’s how I came to know that the entire world was not Jewish like the world in which I had grown up.”

After stints at WAMU, the local public radio station, and for Voice of America in India, Stamberg initially joined NPR, after its founding by an act of Congress in 1971, to cut tape for radio interviews. When “All Things Considered” launched in 1972 she became its co-host and thus also the first woman to anchor a broadcast news program, in her colleagues’ estimation — overcoming considerable sexism from both the network’s listeners and executives. 

Stamberg only held the anchor post for a few years, soon pivoting to the cultural correspondent stories she would become known for. She took on other hosting duties, too, including for “Weekend Edition,” where she introduced the show’s trademark Sunday puzzles and first brought on the guests who would become the mega-popular program “Car Talk.”

“I think all of that is very Jewish, the telling of stories, but also the seeking of opinions and also being open to the range of opinions that are out there,” Stamberg would tell the Jewish Women’s Archive about her work. 

Laughing, she added, “I also feel that sometimes mine’s right. I think that’s very Jewish, too.”

Stamberg is survived by her son and two granddaughters.

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Anti-Israel demonstrators release smoke in the colors of the Palestinian flag as they protest to condemn the Israeli forces’ interception of some of the vessels of the Global Sumud Flotilla aiming to reach Gaza and break Israel’s naval blockade, in Barcelona, Spain, Oct. 2, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Nacho Doce

Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the most respected theologians of the 20th century, often warned that moral certainty can be as dangerous as moral blindness. 

Niebuhr understood that evil rarely shows up wearing horns and carrying a pitchfork. Instead, it dresses itself in virtue, marches under banners of justice, and speaks in the name of compassion. As Niebuhr put it: “Evil loves to disguise itself as good.”

This past week, Greta Thunberg — who first emerged as a precocious teenage climate activist, but has since become one of the most recognizable faces of the “Free Palestine” movement — proved Niebuhr’s point in vivid color. 

In a grotesque distortion of reality, Thunberg gave an interview claiming she was “beaten, kicked, and threatened with gassing” by Israelis during her brief time in Israel after being removed from the flotilla. 

Her tale of “drones dropping gas bombs” on the flotilla, of being dragged to the ground by armed men on arrival in Israel, and then being locked in a cage while taunted and kicked, reads like a fever dream — the kind of deranged fantasy that would embarrass a third-rate propagandist. 

Yet in today’s moral circus, absurdity is no barrier to belief when the villain is Israel and the storyteller is a sainted activist.

Here was a young woman, once seen as the face of idealism, invoking the imagery of Holocaust atrocities and scenes of grotesque torture to demonize Jews, descendants of those who endured those horrors. 

Her interview is a concoction of lurid, self-serving fantasy — the innocent, virtuous fighter for goodness cast as a victim of unspeakable cruelty — a pantomime of righteousness that is, in truth, nothing more than repugnant evil. Not only because it is false, but because she cloaked her invented suffering in the language of moral purity.

And she is hardly alone. The same moral theater has been performed by the legions of “Free Palestine” advocates who filled streets and campuses for two years demanding a ceasefire — only to fall utterly silent once that ceasefire arrived and Jewish hostages were exchanged for Palestinian prisoners at the staggering ratio of one hundred to one.

For all their talk of peace and humanity, these activists’ compassion evaporated the moment the fighting paused. Because their outrage was never about saving lives – it was about condemning Israel. That is why it is evil. These self-styled champions of justice were never rooting for peace — they were rooting for Israel’s destruction: the elimination of the Jewish State and, if history is any guide, the elimination of Jews.

But none of this is new. From the dawn of creation, evil has triumphed not by being ugly, but by masquerading as beauty. Its most dangerous form is not open malice, but moral disguise. 

The very first story in the Book of Books — the Torah — exposes this truth from the outset, warning us that what appears good is often the worst evil imaginable. Shortly after the creation of Adam and Eve, humanity’s prototype couple, they encounter the serpent — the world’s first embodiment of evil. 

But the serpent doesn’t hiss threats or declare itself God’s enemy. On the contrary, it speaks the language of progress, self-empowerment, and enlightenment (Gen. 3:5): “For God knows that when you eat of [the Tree of Knowledge], your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.“ 

Who wouldn’t want to be like God, the ultimate good? In that moment, sin wasn’t presented as rebellion — it was presented as moral advancement. The serpent doesn’t promise wickedness; it promises virtue.

The Midrash Tanchuma captures this deception perfectly: “The serpent approached her with words of friendship.” It spoke softly. It offered companionship. It offered her a path to becoming a better version of herself. 

The Midrash’s phrase “words of friendship” is brilliant. Because evil’s first disguise is not as an enemy, but as a friend. How perfectly that describes so many moral crusaders of our own time. They come bearing empathy, waving the flag of justice, speaking of freedom and compassion — but beneath that promise of goodness lies malice and deceit.

The Ramban adds another dimension. He notes that the serpent’s words were not entirely false. In fact, the deception lay in their half-truth. Eating from the tree would open the human mind to greater awareness. 

As Ramban explains, evil never triumphs by denying goodness outright. It triumphs by redefining it. That is why he calls the Biblical serpent “the most cunning of creatures.” By cunning, he does not mean intelligent – he means manipulative. Evil never approaches us as evil. It comes dressed as the finest form of good. And that is what makes it so dangerous.

The Meshech Chochma takes this one step further. He observes that Eve’s reasoning was layered with justification: “The woman saw that the tree was good for food, a delight to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom.” Each motive sounds noble. 

Eve wasn’t chasing pleasure or greed — she needed food, she appreciated beauty, and she was yearning for wisdom. But that is precisely what made it all so dangerous. The evil was rationalized in the language of good. 

And every moral failure in human history has followed the same pattern. People do not commit evil while calling it evil – they convince themselves they are doing good. Every ideological movement that has unleashed destruction on the world has begun with the same refrain: “We are fighting for justice.”

And so it is today. The woke left has perfected the art of moral inversion — the cloaking of malice in virtue. They proclaim themselves champions of the oppressed, but their selective compassion exposes their true motives. They weep for aggressors and scorn their victims. They champion “human rights,” but only when those who are suffering aren’t Jews. They tell themselves — and the world — that they are building a better society. 

In truth, they are constructing a world where facts are negotiable, morality is political, and good people are the ones you decide are good. In that world, lying is not a sin – it’s a strategy. These do-gooders are the spiritual heirs of the Biblical serpent — fluent in the language of compassion, but devoted to the cause of destruction.

And that, in a sense, is what the Torah story foresaw. Evil does not announce, “I will destroy the world.” It declares, “I will perfect it.” It does not preach hatred — it preaches justice. But in the end, it is evil, pure and simple. 

The Greta Thunberg story is absurd, but it is also deeply symbolic. She represents countless others like her who have mistaken emotion for ethics and outrage for morality. Like Eve gazing at the fruit, they see what is “good for food” and “delightful to the eyes,” but never stop to ask whether it is right.

Niebuhr was correct: evil loves to disguise itself as good. It does so because it knows that goodness is our deepest desire — and therefore our easiest weakness. Like the serpent in Eden, every false prophet of virtue since has used the same tactic. 

Darkness is easy to recognize, but evil is not. Darkness is the absence of light. Evil bends the light, until lies look like truth and hatred feels like compassion. And when that happens, our only defense is the one the Torah prescribes — clarity, humility, and the courage to see through the disguise.

The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.